What You Need to Know About Botswana’s General Elections

The candidates

Masisi, a former schoolteacher who has also worked for UNICEF, is running under the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) which has governed the Southern African country since its independence from Britain in 1966.

Masisi’s tenure has been turbulent, marked by a public fallout with Khama after the 2019 elections. Disputes over policy changes, including the reversal of Khama’s hunting ban, relaxed alcohol laws, and the dismissal of senior officials, led Khama to leave the BDP, which was founded by his father, Sir Seretse Khama, Botswana’s first president.

However, Masisi’s biggest opponent is Duma Boko, a lawyer who is running for president for the third time. Boko’s party, Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), was formed from a coalition of opposition parties and came second in the 2019 elections.

The other candidates are Dumelang Saleshando of the Botswana Congress Party (BCP), which was part of the UDC coalition and won 11 of the 57 parliamentary seats in 2019; and Mephato Reatile of Botswana Patriotic Front (BPF), a party created in 2019 by Khama and other members of the BDP. Khama, who had been in self-imposed exile in South Africa since late 2021, recently returned, aiming to weaken Masisi’s position. The party won three of the 57 seats in parliament in 2019.

The issues

Speaking to OkayAfrica about the situation on ground, political reporter Letlhogile Mpuang says the BDP has lost a lot of the fanfare it enjoyed in 2019. “When [Masisi] came in 2019, there was a lot of goodwill that people felt around him. People felt that he would become a better president. Now he’s playing a catch-up game, trying to do almost everything to try and appease the voters,” he says.

Botswana’s independent electoral body has said that more than one million Batswana have registered to vote. The voters will elect the MPs, who will then elect a president.

Chief among the concerns of Batswana is the high rate of unemployment, which was at 23.38 percent in 2022. “Over and above unemployment, we have issues such as gender-based violence. According to some people, the government doesn’t seem to be doing so much to address it,” says Mpuang.

Additionally, people are concerned about the minimum wage, which currently stands at 1, 500 pula (about $112). The UDC promises to bump this up to 4,000 Pula (about $300) in their manifesto, in addition to creating more jobs. “People believe that times are shifting and getting hard, but there is no improvement in terms of how our salaries are structured in the country, in both the private and the public sector,” Mpuang adds.

Lawrence Seretse, editor at The Botswana Gazette, however believes that economically, while the country has experienced a tough couple of years as a result of the pandemic, “the government has implemented a lot of initiatives to try and give Batswana access to funding to be able to jumpstart their own businesses.”

Seretse says that this election is highly contested with the outcome uncertain. “A lot is going on. There has been a lot of uprising on social media, [and] push-back against the ruling party,” he says.

Botswana, is one of the African countries known for its peace and its stable democracy. It remains to be seen what the reactions to the outcome of the polls will be.